I am going to have a meeting with the professor of gastroenterology whose name is Colin Brown. He’s the top bloke, says Dr Gleason. And I’m seeing him in two days. He’s not going to let my wayward cells proliferate by seeing me later than that.
I remain in a calm mood and plan a letter to the prime minister about Learned. I’m not expecting a great prognosis because, in my generation’s imagination, Jack the Dancer has always been his own prognosis. Death.
In the meantime, life does not await the diagnosis. You discover at such a time that the entire world operates on the assumption that no one is ever dying. It must do so. When I complain to Cath about the unstinting tide of online correspondence, she says, ‘Send all your emails to me.’ And I know she will do them more competently than I, since for some reason Cath knows how to say the sort of ‘no’ that people actually accept. ‘No’ because everything is changed and bets are off and any undertaking of being delighted to launch Cranbrook School’s film club’s festival of student documentaries is now madness.
I go to my computer and send Cath a number of my invitations to deal with. I open a file ready to write a letter regarding Learned to the prime minister. He’s not such a bad fellow – by vision an old-fashioned conservative who believes in keeping the punters prosperous by giving them a stake in the equation. But he’s a captive of right-wing brutes in his party who still believe in serving the market Moloch as an almost theological duty. But give him this – or so I hoped – give him a vision, give him Monsieur Learned and the chance for him to take his own vision to the three sets of elders … Well, he might yet make a leader of himself. For no one in his position, no one with a revenue stream, has ever taken a passionate vision of his own to the elders.
I get as far as putting the prime minister’s address in the letter. After that I sit and my hands begin ridiculously to tremble. That’s never happened before. I want to see Cath as acutely as I want to take my next breath. When I leave my office again, I see, over a few intervening rooftops, the harbour beyond the glass. Then, in front of me, Cath sits at her own little desk in the living room, and her unconscious generosity being an aphrodisiac, I’m moved by more desire than I have recently had the chance to experience, and the images of black lingerie and unloosed breasts come to mind and do not leave the supposed sexual Sahara of my groin unaffected.
Before Cath bends to answering the first email she raises a hand and runs it down my forearm, cosseting me. It is much easier now than when we were thirty. Then we had all the juice but poor knowledge of the other. Grievances as well as hungers inhabited the embrace. Alas, alas! Grievances which by eighty have either driven you apart, or killed you, or been absorbed. How often the breathless ardour of those days, which seemed based on a more gravid and cosmic need as vast as the sky and not unconnected to the earth’s furious core, were, in the way of lovers, interspersed with a gasping rancour.
I can tell Cath is herself a bit awed today. Even though the omens of this have been there in the vanishing years and her husband’s follies, I don’t think she’s prepared to be a widow. We have failed to believe in the weight of our own years, and to prepare ourselves.
Cath has always had such competence. She was a very fine and exacting editor. How often did she drop the kids to school before coming to the sound suite I rented in North Sydney to induce order in the too-much I had exuberantly filmed. She also did the production schedules of a number of my films, which I shot to an extent by making things up on the spot, seeing what came along, and taking a stab at how much money was left after I got the footage I wanted. I chose to do things in that way, it was my thing. Ex tempore. People thought my method-less method was remarkable and even wrote learned articles on it, elevating what might have been a character flaw into a theory. And I could let myself go because in the editing Cath always took the care I had no temperamental gift for. Mind you, I always had a clear sense of narrative, both before I started and, in a more nuanced way, when we’d finished, and I was able to convey the narrative, and Cath was typically loyal to my intention.
Yet even when she was a visitor to a shooting location, I felt she had a stronger sense of the practicalities that were in play than I ever had. I had, after all, shamelessly left the details of our life to her. As I got older I became cavalier about waking up and thinking about who I had to see that day. She had it all written down. She was, fairly or not and without apparent rancour, my diary.
But then … I know many men who say their wives were happy to serve the flame, the career. I sometimes tell Cath I am guilty of repressing her career, or subsuming it into mine. She tells me not to be ridiculous, but she says it with a particular flavour, not as if it isn’t true, but as if it’s a proposition she does not choose to examine – the dear old Pandora’s box itself. I have certainly given our daughters lectures on the matter of subservience, woman to man. But I am not utterly sure I do so from a position of innocence.
People told me I was a good grandfather, in part for being the joker. But I am aware my record with my daughters is, in my memory, more ambiguous. I was already in my thirties when our first daughter, Colley, was born. In our house in West Ryde, with its big backyard, Cath and I envisaged a playground for our children, where each of their movements would be intimately studied by us, the enchanted witnesses in the garden. In those days the father was considered superfluous in the whole drama and pain of the birth. He was told to compose himself in the waiting room and read old Time magazines. But because Cath knew some of the nurses I was allowed in to see Colley the instant after she was born. Improbably small, those few seconds after birth, the creases of the struggle on her forehead, the smears of her passage on her body, Colley was already a mixture of wariness and energy, both of which qualities would mark her in the future. For a number of seconds, she would not begin to breathe. She had a placidity, an air of making a considered Libran decision – it was, after all, a morning in October. She was deciding whether to retreat back under the blanket of time, or to go forward onto its surface. She seemed to know either had its pitfalls.
In those seconds she did not seem blue or short of breath. A doctor approached with a hypodermic as big as her leg and injected something, and she decided, with apparent good humour, that now she would make her first claim on life. And so it came. The first cry of an estimable woman.
A year later, the vigorous, alert Gracie was born, and I saw her after a prompt passage into the world she seemed unbewildered by. That is, more like her mother. Like Colley, Gracie chose early morning to be born – both were daughters of the dawn.
Oh, what a work is man/woman. For example, the child grows in its solitary cell – some poem I read, yes, Judith Wright, called the child in the womb the eyeless labourer in the dark. Its sole discourse with its mother’s heart which imbues it with rhythm. And then, it emerges as a social animal, ready for a meeting, a party, a seminar. Particularly Gracie, born with opinions writhing in her.
In any case, just as our deaths are each, at the ultimate moment, the only death in the universe, so every birth is the first. The father of Mitochondrial Eve’s first child could not have looked on an infant fresh from the blue with the wonder I brought to both occasions.
With Colley, a wariness Gracie would not exhibit. Even at two and three years of age. Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots; Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. And like my quiet mother and vocal father, it may be that the bite of the quieter one, Colley, was subtler and more enduring than that of the tumultuous, daring Gracie.
But it’s not the damage they did each other that worried me.
There was at one stage a great conflict between Cath and me over the term ‘brusque’!
Because of the delicacy with which my mother conducted the life of the Apple household, knowing that my father was capable of great verbal passion, we Apples were a polite family – sometimes to the point Cath would come to condemn as emotional dishonesty. By contrast, Cath’s family, the McKelveys, insulted each other routinely and robustly and in ways I sometimes thought extreme and harsh and wounding. When Cath began verbally disciplining our daughters, there was conflict between us. I felt I had the same sensibility as Colley – and partway that of Gracie too. But when Cath was tired and furious at mayhem in the kitchen or living area, she could turn ferocious and bark instructions in the McKelvey manner. If I was home and, of course, playing at being the jolly giant I would see the girls recoil, would see their eyes bruise. And when I raised the matter one day, using that silly and inadequate term ‘brusque’, Cath chose to see in the nicety of the adjective evidence of the Apple family’s fear of conflict and their mealy-mouthed, neurotic politeness.
I see now that we were both right – the McKelveys too reckless with abuse, the Apples crafting everything they said to avoid the risk of affront. At this distance of time it is obvious that Cath did moderate her ‘brusqueness’, just as I moderated my fear of terror. And yet there was another aspect of the Apples’ family ethos that wasn’t as tame as fear of brusqueness, and in some ways was more ruthless than the McKelveys’ brand of easy-come, easy-go fury. For we did not forgive. My father taught me that forgiveness should be denied unto the third and fourth generation. And in my middle years, still not utterly reconciled and when tempted by the urbanity of this or that woman, I remembered, or chose to remember, my daughters’ bruised eyes.
Both Colley and Gracie claim to have forgotten it all: my erratic rages, Cath’s, our arguments.
My reluctance to forgive is so far gone now, but perhaps I hung on to it, wilfully, a stored-up reason for ultimate betrayal.
I sometimes ask myself whether, had Cath not yelled at our kids with passion, she could have displayed her profound enthusiasm for beating Jack the Dancer, and his ambitions for my organs? People are, after all, a package. And I am now more puzzled by the package I am than by Cath.
Now, together, we went to see the gastroenterologist, Professor Brown. He took me by surprise, as many young doctors do now. Instead of a professional gravitas – the irreproachable carapace of a well-cut neutral suit and a tie with some medical association’s or college’s restrained logo – Professor Brown was tie-less, ageless, healthy, and at peace with earth and sea.
There was something in me that resisted these younger, unpretentious specialists. Did I want a sun-addled democrat with a shock of rich hair negotiating with Jack the Dancer on my behalf? Or did I want a God-the-Father imitator of august mien, whose severity and inscrutability were so absolute that you felt you were in the hands of heaven. In my childhood, great aunts and uncles died without doubt, were buried without second guesses or grievances, under old doctors – the young ones were in the army for World War II – whose capacity for impersonating God was probably much better than their surgery.
In any case, I was to have the surfer kid. We shook hands and all sat down, whereupon Dr Brown became earnest in that new sort of way, with a far more egalitarian manner than that of the old doctors. He had the report and X-rays from my recent endoscopy to go on, along with an MRI I’d undergone the day after Dr Gleason had broken the news. He explained the terms he flung about, and encouraged me not to leave the surgery with any unanswered questions.
This young man, distinguished but humble about it, but without any demigod ambitions, explained that there had been until recently only simple and grievous options or outcomes for people in my situation. If the cancer had metastasised, or spread, the oesophagus would need to be cut out. If the whole of the oesophagus needed to be excised the stomach was then connected up directly with the throat. The victim’s stomach, as I understood it, my stomach, was then in my chest for the rest of my life.
As well as taking out all or part of the oesophagus, the surgeon during a total or partial oesophagostomy took out any lymph nodes which might contain cancer cells. Apparently, unknown to me, lymph nodes encircled the oesophagus. They too had been doing their humble dark work since my infancy. Now I heard about them as a line of vulnerability, the support trenches that the enemy wanted to overrun. For they would tell whether I needed therapy before the slap-up surgery.
‘And scars?’ asked Cath, who did not want to see me bear heavy ones.
‘I used to go the trans-hiatal route.’ Brown smiled as if he were discussing methods to ride a surfboard, regular or goofy foot. ‘But even now, the cutting is substantial. I won’t pretend otherwise.’
Cath, nodding, began to weep. I reached for her and hugged and hushed her. It was so poignant she did not want me dead or marred that I struggled myself with tears.
‘But that may not be necessary,’ he hurried to say, because these days there was a third option, which started out with a smaller procedure involving mirrors and lasers, and a surgeon who could remove the carcinoma from the mucosa itself and leave the structure intact and even cauterise the Barrett’s Syndrome with radio frequency and tell us if it had spread. That was step one, he told us. I mentioned I had read on the Internet that if the tumours were in Stage III or IV the prognosis was pretty dismal.
‘No need to order the flowers yet,’ he assured me. ‘It’s good that you can eat normally and don’t have many swallowing problems yet. So let’s see what we find.’
He wanted to send me to a colleague who could assess the state of my cancer with her oesophageal cameras – she too would do it within a couple of days as a matter of urgency. She had a way with those new cameras, he said, and with her radio-frequency wand. I would need a general anaesthetic. This, he said, could well be the answer for me. Though no one knew.
Then he said in a ‘hey-dude-it’s-only-death!’ manner, ‘You won an Academy Award, Mr Apple?’
‘A long time ago,’ I replied with the apparent indifference even a documentary maker should show towards a lottery like the Oscars. ‘A feature documentary on Vietnam.’
Cath said nothing. She knew how uneasy I was over the death of Andy.
‘Maybe you could bring it in one day,’ he said. For no one had a doctorate when it came to the movies. Everyone was a peasant. ‘The Oscar, I mean. Perhaps you could let me fondle it a while.’
It was as if death was not the fourth member of our discourse. But of course, I didn’t quite believe that myself. That was another theory of mine: that there was a chemical resistance to belief of death in us; that even in the midst of cataclysm we are convinced of survival; or at least that even in ghastly terror our money and hope is on it.
If we were truly convinced of death, we would do nothing in life except intersperse our despair at the ferocious weight of time we would serve in our death with brief spasms of sex and alcohol. And yet, though we had not here a lasting city, we insisted on paving its streets as if we did, and we were (hence the kindness of Cath’s work) outraged when even the dying failed to answer their emails promptly.
I was pleased that for now, though the world was old and the universe without heart, in that clean surgery office amongst glossy bas-relief images of the oesophagus, Cath was seduced into believing that death held no mortgage on her own man.
When we returned to chatting about my tumours, it was as if they were some fungus attacking the sclerophyll forests.
At home again – I insisted on driving – I believed it time to write to the prime minister with new energy and persuasiveness.
The HON Roger Milland
PRIME MINISTER
AUSTRALIA
Re: The Learned Lakes World Heritage Site: The Chance for a Great World Heritage Site.
Dear Prime Minister,
Learned Man, a set of bones waiting on a bench at an Australian Museum depository for disposal and return to his native Learned Lakes’ area north of Balranald, is 42,000 years old. Learned Woman is a set of remains nearly as old. They represent the two oldest human ritual burials we possess evidence of on earth. These enormously ancient members of the species Homo sapiens, our species, were also members of a community which inhabited the lunette of Lake Learned between 60,000 years Before the Present Era …
I had written all this so many times, with so little effect, to so many politicians. The rhetorical flourishes and the pattern of sentences were all familiar. I had a feeling that in another time they might have an impact but that in the current political world, where the issue of the economy and worship of the market overrode all other issues, they did not compel, they did not cut ice.
Despite the day, I had failed to make a new, compelling language. I could not therefore create a revelation in my addressee, or evoke a new urgency. I saved the file.